The Age of Dryden Part 12

_Squire Sul._ To get an heir to my estate.

_Sir Chas._ And have you succeeded?

_Squire Sul._ No.

_Arch._ The condition fails of his side.--Pray, madam, what did you marry for?

_Mrs. Sul._ To support the weakness of my s.e.x by the strength of his, and to enjoy the pleasures of an agreeable society.

_Sir Chas._ Are your expectations answered?

_Mrs. Sul._ No.

_Count Bel._ A clear case! a clear case!

_Sir Chas._ What are the bars to your mutual contentment?

_Mrs. Sul._ In the first place, I can't drink ale with him.

_Squire Sul._ Nor can I drink tea with her.

_Mrs. Sul._ I can't hunt with you.

_Squire Sul._ Nor can I dance with you.

_Mrs. Sul._ I hate c.o.c.king and racing.

_Squire Sul._ And I abhor ombre and piquet.

_Mrs. Sul._ Your silence is intolerable.

_Squire Sul._ Your prating is worse.

_Mrs. Sul._ Have we not been a perpetual offence to each other?

a gnawing vulture at the heart?

_Squire Sul._ A frightful goblin to the sight?

_Mrs. Sul._ A porcupine to the feeling?

_Squire Sul._ Perpetual wormwood to the taste?

_Mrs. Sul._ Is there on earth a thing we could agree in?

_Squire Sul._ Yes--to part.

_Mrs. Sul._ With all my heart.

_Squire Sul._ Your hand.

_Mrs. Sul._ Here.

_Squire Sul._ These hands joined us, these shall part us.--Away!

_Mrs. Sul._ North.

_Squire Sul._ South.

_Mrs. Sul._ East.

_Squire Sul._ West--far as the poles asunder.

_Count Bel._ Begar, the ceremony be vera pretty!'

Farquhar is fuller of allusions to contemporary events and humours than any of the other dramatists, and these are sometimes very happy; as when a promising scheme is said to be in danger of 'going souse into the water, like the Eddystone lighthouse,' or when an alarm is given by shouting, 'Thieves! thieves! murder! _popery!_' Another peculiarity of all these dramatists, but especially Farquhar, is the constant use in serious pa.s.sages of a broken blank verse, which continually seems upon the point of becoming regular ten-syllabled iambic, but never maintains this elevation for any considerable s.p.a.ce. The extremely powerful scene between the two Fainalls, in Congreve's _Love for Love_, for example, which borders closely upon tragedy, is all but regular blank verse, which, if perfectly finished, would be much better than the verse of _The Mourning Bride_. It is difficult to determine whether this was intentional or accidental. Possibly the exigencies of the performers had something to do with it. It is by no means unlikely that prose, as well as verse, was then declaimed with more attention to rhythm than is now the custom. In estimating the merits of these dramas it must never be forgotten, as a point in their favour, that they were written for the stage, and that success in the closet was quite a secondary consideration with the authors; on the other hand, that they had the advantage of being produced when the histrionic art of England was probably at its zenith.

This notice of the later Restoration comedy may be completed by the mention of three ladies who cultivated it with success during the latter part of the seventeenth century. How much of this success, in the case of one of them, was due to merit, and how much to indecency, is a difficult, though not in every sense of the term a nice or delicate question. Despite the offensiveness of her writings, Aphra Behn (1640-1689), whose maiden name was Johnson, is personally a sympathetic figure. She was born in 1640, and as a girl went out with her family to Surinam, then an English possession. She there made the acquaintance of the Indian chief Oroonoko and his bride Imoinda, afterwards celebrated in the novel by her upon which Southern founded his popular play.

Returning to England, she married a Dutch merchant of the name of Behn, and after his death was sent as a spy to Antwerp. A young Dutchman to whom she was engaged died; she was wrecked and nearly drowned upon her return to England; and, probably from necessity, as the English government appears to have refused to recompense or even to reimburse her, turned novelist and playwright. Her novels will be noticed in another place; her eighteen plays have, with few exceptions, sufficient merit to ent.i.tle her to a respectable place among the dramatists of her age, and sufficient indelicacy to be unreadable in this. It may well be believed, on the authority of a female friend, that the auth.o.r.ess 'had wit, humour, good-nature, and judgment; was mistress of all the pleasing arts of conversation; was a woman of sense, and _consequently_ a woman of pleasure.' She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but not in Poets'

Corner. The plays of Mrs. Manley (1672-1724), though moderately successful, need not detain us here, but we shall have to speak of her as a writer of fiction. She was the daughter of a Cavalier knight, but became the mistress of Alderman Barber, and was concerned in several doubtful transactions. Swift, nevertheless, speaks of her as a good person 'for one of her sort'--fat and forty, it seems, but _not_ fair.

Mrs. Susannah Centlivre (1667-1723) appears to have had her share of adventures in her youth, but survived to contract one of the most respectable unions imaginable, namely, with the queen's cook. She was a wholesale adapter from the French, and her lively comedies possess little literary merit, but so much dramatic instinct that three of them, _The Busy Body_, _The Wonder_, and _A Bold Stroke for a Wife_, remained long upon the list of acting plays, and might be represented even now.

CHAPTER VII.

CRITICISM.

The age of the Restoration possessed many men qualified to s.h.i.+ne in criticism, but their ac.u.men is in general only indicated by casual remarks, and, setting aside the metrical prolusions of Roscommon and Sheffield, nearly all the serious criticism it has bequeathed to us proceeds from the pen of Dryden. No other of our poets except Coleridge and Wordsworth has given us anything so critically valuable, but Dryden's princ.i.p.al service is one which they could not render; for, even if their style had equalled his--and this would be too much to say even of Wordsworth's--it could not have exerted the same wide and salutary influence. Dryden is ent.i.tled to be considered as the great reformer of English prose, the writer in whom the sound principles of the Restoration were above all others impersonated, and who above all others led the way to that clear, sane, and balanced method of writing which it was the especial mission of Restoration literature to introduce. We need only compare his style with Milton's to be sensible of the enormous progress in the direction of perspicuity and general utility. Milton is a far more eloquent writer, but his style is totally unfit for the close reasoning and accurate investigation which the pressure of politics and the development of science and philosophy were soon to require, and the rest of the prosaists of the time are, with few exceptions, either too pedantic or too commonplace. Dryden is lucid, easy, familiar, yet he can be august and splendid on occasion, and if he does not emulate Milton's dithyrambic, the dignity of English prose loses nothing in his hands.

Take the opening of his _Dialogue on Dramatic Poesy_:

'It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late war, when our navy engaged the Dutch; a day wherein the two most mighty and best appointed fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of the globe, the commerce of nations, and the riches of the universe: while these vast floating bodies, on either side, moved against each other in parallel lines, and our countrymen, under the happy conduct of his royal highness, went breaking, by little and little, into the line of the enemies; the noise of the cannon from both navies reached our ears about the city, so that all men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense of the event, which they knew was then deciding, every one went following the sound as his fancy led him; and leaving the town almost empty, some took towards the park, some across the river, others down it; all seeking the noise in the depth of silence.

'Amongst the rest, it was the fortune of Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander, to be in company together; three of them persons whom their wit and quality have made known to all the town; and whom I have chose to hide under these borrowed names, that they may not suffer by so ill a relation as I am going to make of their discourse.

'Taking then a barge, which a servant of Lisideius had provided for them, they made haste to shoot the bridge, and left behind them that great fall of waters which hindered them from hearing what they desired: after which, having disengaged themselves from many vessels which rode at anchor in the Thames, and almost blocked up the pa.s.sage towards Greenwich, they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently, and then, every one favouring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them like the noise of distant thunder, or of swallows in a chimney:[8] those little undulations of sound, though almost vanis.h.i.+ng before they reached them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror, which they had betwixt the fleets. After they had attentively listened till such time as the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius, lifting up his head, and taking notice of it, was the first who congratulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation's victory: adding, that we had but this to desire in confirmation of it, that we might hear no more of that noise, which was now leaving the English coast.'

This fine induction can hardly have formed part of the original essay, which, Dryden tells us, was written in the country in 1665, since the naval battle, which was fought on June 3rd, 1665, is described as having taken place in 'the first summer of the late war.' One extraordinary pa.s.sage must have been left uncorrected by oversight, at least we cannot well suppose that Dryden would have printed 'Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a poem' after the appearance of _Paradise Lost_, which was published on the day after the conclusion of the Peace of Breda, not then known in England. The essay has two objects not very compatible: to defend the English stage against the French, and to advocate the use of rhyme in tragedy, which necessarily gives the piece a French air, and makes it appear imitative, when it is in truth original. Dryden points out with considerable force the restrictions which French dramatists of the cla.s.sical school impose upon themselves by servile adherence to the unities of time and place, and in a well-known pa.s.sage which does honour to his taste sets Shakespeare above Ben Jonson. His criticism of _Troilus and Cressida_, in his essay on _The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_ (1679), is instructive as ill.u.s.trating by force of contrast that enlarged view of Shakespeare for which we are indebted to Goethe and Coleridge. He justly censures _Troilus and Cressida_ as a play; it does not occur to him that Shakespeare may have intended a satire. All his essays, which consist princ.i.p.ally of prefaces and dedications to his own works, are worth reading; none more so than his defence of Virgil in the dedication to his translation of his poems, and the remarks on Horace and Juvenal in his _Essay on Satire_. Everywhere we must admire his sanity, penetration, and ma.s.sive common sense; his chief defects are conventional prejudice, negligence (as when he ascribes the invention of blank verse to Shakespeare), and the parade of second-hand learning. It may be said of his criticisms, as truly as of his poems or plays, that his merits are his own, his faults those of his age.

Another critic of the stage only deserves notice in this capacity from his connection with Dryden. Thomas Rymer (1639-1714) will be mentioned again as a meritorious antiquary. As a critic he is remarkable for having by his _Tragedies of the Last Age_ (1673) drawn some judicious remarks from Dryden, and for having a.n.a.lyzed _Oth.e.l.lo_ as a pattern of a bad play. He has consequently been unanimously hooted by his countrymen, for it pa.s.ses belief that Pope should have praised him to Spence, though Spence affirms it. It was his misfortune to be an Englishman; in France at the time his views would have been thought very correct; in fact, he criticises Shakespeare much in the style of Voltaire. He is a votary of decorum and dignity, and would no more than Voltaire have let a mouse into a tragedy. He discusses with imperturbable gravity, 'Who and who may kill one another with decency?' and decides, 'In poetry no woman is to kill a man, except her quality gives her the advantage above him.

Poetical decency will not suffer death to be dealt to each other by such persons, whom the laws of duel allow not to enter the lists together.' And Rymer would have been content to have dwelt in such decencies for ever.

Jeremy Collier, a Nonjuring clergyman (1650-1726), attained fame, not as the advocate of decencies, but of decency. His _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_ (1698) occasioned a great sensation, and was efficacious in abating the evils against which it was directed, although it is probable that Addison's mild rebuke and better example accomplished even more. As the adversary of men of wit and genius, Collier has become obnoxious to their representatives, and has been unfairly reviled as a sour fanatic. In fact he is very moderate, admits that the stage may be a valuable medium of instruction, and only denounces its abuse. Scott and Macaulay have done him justice, and Mr. Gosse gives an excellent a.n.a.lysis of his work in his biography of Congreve. His wit is as unquestionable as his zeal, but his argument is not everywhere equally cogent. On the chapter of profaneness he is fantastic and straitlaced, and so tender of dignities that he will not allow even the G.o.d Apis to be disrespectfully mentioned. On that of immorality he is unanswerable, and unless the incriminated dramatists were prepared to say, 'Evil, be thou my good,' they could but own

'Pudet haec opprobria n.o.bis Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli.'

Congreve and Vanbrugh attempted to reply, but to little purpose. Dryden kissed the rod. Collier's volume is said to have been 'conceived, disposed, transcribed, and printed in a month.' He had previously achieved notoriety as a Jacobite pamphleteer, and in his old age became the official head of the decaying sect of the Nonjurors.